Tagged: education

It’s been a busy summer. Apart from conferences, telematic geospatial performances across the Atlantic, and plenty of research, pd-l2ork has been making big strides towards becoming a robust full-fledged digital signal processing tool. The latest version includes revolutionary preset_hub and preset_node system that supports a wide range of data types as well as abstractions. It is essentially Pd’s counterpart to Max’s pattrstorage. We’ve also squashed dozens of bugs and clean-ups making pd-l2ork better than ever.

Perhaps the most exciting improvement involves Pd-L2Ork’s K12 module geared towards elementary, middle, and high school students. The new version has over 40 objects, allowing students to seamlessly interact with both Wiimotes and SARC iteration of Arduino Uno devices (a.k.a. Sarcduino firmware). And this very version together with 15 L2Ork stations is being used this week by more than 30 middle-school students as part of the inaugural ICAT K12 Maker Workshop taking place in ICAT’s Studio 1. So, head on over to the L2Ork’s software page and check out what the latest version of pd-l2ork is all about ;-)

On a somewhat related note, the entire fleet of L2Ork stations has been migrated to Ubuntu 12.04 and are now eagerly awating for the next generation of l2orkists to use them this coming fall as part of our ongoing L2Ork ensemble. For all VT students interested in participating, please do not hesitate to contact us.

As we prepare for our presentation at this year’s NIME conference (for those attending NIME you can see us during the 130pm demo session later today), it is my great pleasure to announce a new version of Pd-L2Ork programming environment (the backbone of our software infrastructure) featuring the K-12 learning module prototype. Geared specifically towards K-12 students, the newfound module addresses the lack of a robust sound- and music-oriented programming tool for elementary, middle, and high-school students. The current prototype is a first step towards a tiered granular design of learning objects that aim to recontextualize pd-l2ork into a K-12 learning tool. The resulting first iteration offers a limited set of coarse-grained objects geared primarily towards 4th and 5th graders. This, however, has not deterred Boys & Girls Club of Southwest Virginia students participating in the afterschool program from making some quite evolved instruments using Nintendo Wiimotes and their satellite laptop orchestra in less than three sessions 1-hour–a rough-cut video footage of our most recent session with the students after the break.

For more info on Pd-L2Ork see our Software page. To enable the K12 mode, simply start pd-l2ork with the -k12 flag as follows:

pd-l2ork -k12

I would like to hereby encourage all interested in furthering the said tool to join us on the l2ork-dev mailing list. We are particularly interested in growing a library of coarse-grained objects pertaining to sound generation and signal manipulation. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to like us on our new facebook page ;-)

Yes, the rumors are indeed true. Last fall L2Ork has partnered up with the Boys & Girls Club of Roanoke, VA and the Music Lab at the Jefferson Center and with the help of grants from 21st Century and Bank of America, we are now in the process of designing and building a satellite laptop orchestra for the 5th graders. As excited as we are about our upcoming version 2.0 of our shiny hemispherical speakers, we simply had to share this photo with everyone. The red hemispherical speakers offer a number of structural improvements over the old design, as well as the new red look. The new hemis have already become famous among l2orkists as “ladybugs.”

As part of our ongoing partnership with the Boys & Girls Club, this coming Friday we will be hosting 5th graders here at Virginia Tech DISIS who will assist us in building the remaining “ladybugs” as well as have an opportunity to interact and “jam” with VT l2orkists. The event will be held on Friday March 19th 3:30-5:30pm (EST) in DISIS. We would like to use this opportunity to also cordially invite all VT Stakeholders to join us in celebrating this exciting event. For directions to DISIS, please click here.

To top this all off, I have a number of other exciting announcements to share with you, so stay tuned for more updates.